Unemployed in a Small Town: I'm on a Roll...

Evidently I am really hard on trucks. I mean, I think it might have something to do with my job and the terrain on which I travel, but I can't help but feel partially responsible. As you have probably guessed, I am back in Laramie, with a (once again) malfunctioning truck. But let me back up, because last week I did go to the desert and was somehow able to stay out for the full 5 days as I had intended (despite the desert's best effort to break me down), and this week I did get a whole 2.5 worthwhile work days in...so at least I'm making progress, albeit in short and frustrating bursts.

So last week I left for the desert on Monday, got there late afternoon, and managed to put in several productive hours of happy and distraction-less inventorying. I was feeling good, I was remembering everything I love about the desert, and I was really enjoying it. It felt great, I had my positive energy back! By day two my positivity was flagging, as I wrestled with a pounding headache in the 95 degree heat of the desert, shadeless and unforgiving. I drank roughly 3,596 gallons of water, took a 10 minute power nap mid-day, and powered through, still somehow putting in a 12 hour day, but feeling decidedly less happy about the whole thing.

Day 3 proved a tad frustrating when a swiftly deteriorating supply of gas sent me out to town and then, because I was already down that way I tried to access the southern part of the unit and found first that an oil/gas road had been built on top of a portion of one route that I had hoped to use for access, causing the latter half to be difficult to access and therefor abandoned. Then, a second effort landed me on the path of an old two-track that had also since been buried by a large constructed oil/gas route, but one that had been abandoned, and if you have ever done any traveling in the desert you know that these constructed roads do NOT age well. After the first washed out and rocky hill I felt hesitant, but continued. The second had me paying attention, and the third washout left me concerned that I might somehow get myself into a place that I would find I could not get out of. Frustrated I paced around the truck, mulling over my options: Waste half a day driving back to the part of the unit I knew I could easily access, waste half a day hiking the remainder of this route to decide if traversing this washout would simply land me in the thick of several more, or wing it and risk getting stuck. Just as I was stomping around proclaiming to the heavens that "this s#!t only happens to me", a wild horse happened by and my puppy exited the truck via a flying leap out the window and took off running through cacti and sage brush to see if it would be her friend. Fortunately she's a smart dog, and she quickly realized that the retreating horse was not interested in her friendship, so she turned around and returned to the vehicle, not the least bit sorry for having ignored my angry screams for her to come back. That was it, I loaded her into the truck, buckled her harness into the seat belt (she did not like this), and turned this whole mess around for territory that I knew would present far fewer challenges.

Day 4, opened with a long quiet walk, cool and pleasant just after sunrise. On a winding road alternating through sand dunes and clay flats, I strolled along happily with my puppy. A small threatening exchange took place with an offended wild horse, much to the confusion of non-horse-savvy puppy, but other than that the walk was pleasant and uneventful. And so I naively thought perhaps the entire day would follow suit. By 2:00 pm the wind had picked up to such an extent that attempting to take a photo with the I-pad became akin to resistance strength training and large, Audrey Hepburn style sunglasses were required just to keep my contacts from blowing out of my eyeballs. I have no way of knowing, but I'm confident that these winds were in excess of 50 to 60 mph, as they were consistently rocking the entire pickup truck and opening the windward door became exceedingly challenging. By the end of the day a great deal of dust had blown into and around everything that composed my entire view of the world, my teeth were gritty, my ears had small beaches in them, my hair was an absurd rat's nest of sand and dust, and my normally black dog was an awkward shade of khaki. It was 5:00 pm; when in the field I usually try to work 6:30 to 6:30 and so I had an hour and a half to kill but had found myself at the mouth of a road leading into the WSA (Wilderness Study Area) where mechanized transport is forbidden, and I knew I had a walk of several hours to capture the entire road. Rather than quit early I decided to inventory the road as far as the first spur route to a reservoir, and capture all of that so that tomorrow I would be able to race through the first part and start just beyond that spur. After quickly stuffing water and maps, snacks and a compass into my pack I set out, puppy by my side, onto this two-track, and straight towards an ominous looking cloud. Experience told me that this giant cloud would, despite it's best effort, drop only 10 or 12 raindrops on the desert floor, the rest evaporating in the insanely dry air before ever reaching the ground, so I felt confident in my choice to continue on.

Unfortunately experiences breeds confidence that some might describe as "false", and in this case that would be an accurate assessment. Although I was correct in assuming that very little of the rain would reach the ground, I was incorrect in assuming that this would cause no problems for me. You see, immediately preceding those 12 drops of rain was a wall of wind the likes of which I daresay I have never experienced on foot before, and carried along by that wall of wind were millions upon millions of grains of sand. So literally the instant I reached the spur route that I had intended to hike I turned to see a dust storm reminiscent of those I encountered in Mauritania, headed my way. I quickly turned and quite literally ran, full backpack on and dog leash in hand with a confused, frolicking, and tug-of-warring puppy on the other end, back the way I had come, hoping beyond hope that I would reach the truck before the sand reached me. I didn't. 10 breathless, awkward, lumbering minutes later I dropped to my knees and wrapped myself over my doggies eyes as the stinging sand blasted the outer layers of skin off the backs of my legs. To make matters worse, the winds barely slowed throughout the entire evening and picked up with a vengeance sometime after 11:00 pm, shaking the truck of side to side and generally destroying any hope I had of getting a good nights sleep.

The final day of this trip was uneventful, ended early, and I was back in Laramie by nightfall. Thunderstorm warnings kept me from returning to Adobe Town this Monday morning, and my return Tuesday went well; I was even able to get in two full, uneventful days before disaster struck again. This time I was camping somewhere near the center of the entire unit, but at the southern end of the WSA, generally speaking in the middle of nowhere, on a little eroded two-track route that was frequently buried in sand dunes. In the morning I got up, fed my pup, and cooked my oatmeal all while still cocooned in my sleeping bag in the 40 degree desert morning. When I finally felt ready to emerge and take on the day, I stalled out the truck. Odd, I thought, I've been driving a standard since I was 17, shouldn't I be able to get the truck moving without stalling it out at this point in my life? A second effort yielded the same result, and on the third I stamped the gas and completely let off the clutch immediately and rolled away without incident. Now that I was moving I decided to investigate the clutch pedal, because that's apparently how my priorities worked out in my head: 1) get truck moving, and 2) now determine whats wrong with it. Seems wise.

I found I had no tension in the clutch pedal anymore until the very last instant, and sometimes even with the clutch to the floor it continued to move. If you knew me when I lived in Saint Thomas, then you know that I have experienced such issues before, only that time with our old jeep, aptly named the adventuremobile, and stuck in bumper to bumper cruise-ship-day-traffic. So this time at least I didn't have seven safari trucks full of tourists on all sides to watch me shove the darn truck into gear with all I'm worth and quietly pray my way through every stop sign, at least there was that. At any rate I was so far in, on a road I had already inventoried the far end of, and I really didn't want to have to drive it again. So I parked the truck and went for what I thought would be a two hour but turned out to be more like a four hour long hike, to finish that road, all the roads coming off of it, and a reservoir smack dab in the middle of nowhere. When I got back to the truck I locked in the hubs, and wrestled it around, and slow and steady, picked my way all the way back to a county road. There I called my pops to talk me through adding some clutch (brake) fluid and carefully headed for the highway, and eventually home.

So here I am again, back earlier than I intended, heading back out later than intended, but Grimace the purple truck needs his R&R time too...so that's that. And hey, at least it wasn't a tire, so I didn't have to go back to Walmart, which I don't think my delicate psyche could have taken at this point.

If you are reading this and thinking "man, somebody should get that girl a better truck!" then I urge you to go to BCA's website and make a small, one-time donation, and feel free to send us an email requesting that the money be spent on fixing up poor old Grimace. Alternatively, you may call any wealthy friends that you may have and ask them nicely if they'd like to buy me a new truck. You also might be thinking, "man, that girl kills trucks, I would never hire her to do anything ever because she just destroys everything she touches" but I assure you that I asked a reputable source and I am under the understanding that there is no way the slave cylinder could have been caused to leak by my driving, and it's more likely that it was a re-manufactured part that was faulty and failed well before it should have, regardless of how it was driven. So if you feel that way you should still go to BCA's website and make a small, one-time donation and let them know that you know I'm not a truck killer, at least not on purpose...

Here, I'll even give you the link! Because I'm so thoughtful! http://www.voiceforthewild.org/page.php?id=donate#.UcTlQ_ksmys